Gladiator Facts

Among the other tidbits offered in this review of a new book about gladiators is the curious fact that Emperor Domitian once organized nighttime games in which female gladiators (gladiatrices?) fought dwarfs by torchlight.

The book, entitled The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport is by a professor of ancient history at the University of Amsterdam (named, rather curiously, Fik Meijer, a name that might be translated as "Fuck Better")

Other curious facts: Gladiators attended schools and belonged to unions, were fed a diet mostly of barley gruel (which earned them the nickname "barley-porridge-eaters"). Many committed suicide, few won freedom, and the Colosseum had no toilets. There was a taxonomy of gladiatorial types based on weapon and armor; a thraex (small shield, sword like a dagger), for example, was to be distinguished from a retiarius (shielded left arm, trident, net) .

Quote of the Day

"One of the reasons that the word "communitarian" sounds so sickly and vapid--apart from the fact that it is sickly and vapid--is its inauthentic nostalgia. A sense of community and solidarity is either innate or it is nothing: If you have to call something a community these days ("the business community," "the Hispanic community," best and worst of all, "the intelligence community") then it almost certainly isn't one."

Christopher Hitchens in the Weekly Standard

Theroux on Africa

That "Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit," writes Paul Theroux in a much circulated but utterly self-regarding piece in the New York Times.

Ostensibly an attack on celebrity-led efforts to "save" Africa by more money, Theroux manages both to accuse and congratulate himself for his work there during the 1960s.

"Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago," he writes of himself, "are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions." By proposed solutions he means not only massive monetary donations but also aid in the form of foreign doctors, nurses, and teachers of the kind that he himself was back in the day:

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated.

Volunteers like Theroux himself, in other words, prohibited or at any rate stunted the development of a native professoriat. But now we have pale-skinned Brad and Angelina "cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity" while African leaders such as Bingu wa Mutharika inaugurate their regimes by the purchase of a fleet of Maybachs.

Theroux reserves the brunt of his attacks for the man known as Bono. The Irish rock star/humanitarian/wine snob "not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers."

The problem, concludes Theroux, is that because Africa is "a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth." All this in a piece in which the writer himself, who showed his true colours in the Naipaul affair some years ago, tries to convince the world of his own moral superiority.

The Wrath of Roth

A typically petulant Philip Roth accords an interview to a Danish journalist to promote his latest book in that country, and makes it a point not to smile, not even at the charming silly antics of the photographer.

"Do you ever smile at all?" asks the journalist.

"Yes," Roth responds, "when I'm hiding in the corner and no one sees it."

The interview proceeds in this way until the journalist, referring to the theme of ornery older men with nubile younger women found in Roth's books, brings up the scandal about a 68-year-old Danish author who was stripped of all honour after writing openly about a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old black girl in Haiti - the daughter of his servant.

Roth suddenly perks up, wanting to know every detail of the story, before pronouncing, expertly: "That author asked for it. Did he really write about how he had sex with the girl in his master bedroom? Yes, that's interesting. It turned political. If it was an affair with a 25-year-old student at the university in Port-au-Prince, it wouldn't have been a problem."

Such a quick and decisive assessment could only have come from a mind that has thought long and hard about the exact boundaries of sexual morality, about what one can and cannot get away with and the reasons why.

"You know," Roth reflects, " passion doesn't change with age, but you change - you become older. The thirst for women becomes more poignant. And there is a power in the pathos of sex that it didn't have before. The pathos of the female body becomes more insistent. The sexual passion is always deep, but it becomes deeper."

The interview concludes, appropriately, with a few reflections on death.

"Are you afraid of dying?" the interviewer asks.

Roth pauses. "Yes, I'm afraid. It's horrible... What else could I say? It's heartbreaking. It's unthinkable. It's incredible. Impossible."

What is he afraid of? "Oblivion. Of not being alive, quite simply, of not feeling life, not smelling it. But the difference between today and the fear of dying I had when I was 12, is that now I have a kind of resignation towards reality. It no longer feels like a great injustice that I have to die."

Canning the Pineapple

Having inspected the enormous crockery filled with human body parts, after alighting on the lush, volcanic island of Guadaloupe in November of 1493, Columbus and his men spotted, then tasted, what must have seemed to their eyes an utterly fabulous object: a giant and grotesque fruit whose exterior was segmented like a pine cone but whose interior was rather apple-like, at least to the limited European taste of the time.

A new "biography" of the pine-apple by Fran Beauman, reviewed recently in the Times of London, reminds us again just how extraordinary this now rather common fruit actually is.

So unique was the first succulent bite that John Locke, in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” asserted the impossibility of knowing the “Relish” (and Platonic Idea) of the fruit before actually trying it empirically. Of course in the 1670s, the Pine-Apple was the “ultimate in inaccessible luxury fruit.” Once one got past its rebarbative exterior, with its "outrageous green spikes" that made it something of the rhinocerous of fruits, and exposed its brilliant yellow (and at that time greenish) meat, one could experience a terrific explosion of complex flavours, from "the most delicate in the Peach, the Strawberry, the Muscadine Grape and the Pippin” to "the Quince and the Melon."

It should come as no suprise therefore that the pineapple, that sacred monster of fruits, became a symbol of status amongst, for example, the English aristocracy:

Meanwhile, the pineapple itself began to be used as an ornament at the dinner table. Especially prized were English pineapples, grown with absurd labours in a hothouse “pinery”, an accessory to a country estate which, says Beauman, “every self-respecting aristocrat” aspired to possess. Beauman calculates that once all the costs of a pinery are considered – a stock of costly pineapple plants and pots and a glasshouse to contain them, a 40-foot stove to heat the glasshouse, a garden boy to tend the stove full-time – the expense of a single English-raised pineapple in the second half of the eighteenth century was about £80, or £5,000 in today’s money.

As the reviewer puts it, this is a "Tocquevillean book, regretting the decline in mystery that came with the mass production of pineapple, while at the same time recognizing the democratic benefits of commerce. " In Victorian times, the reviewer explains rather sniffily, the aspiring middle-class might have gone so far as to acquire pineapples for hire, often overripe from extended abuse, for special occasions "in order to appear grand, praying that no one would actually attempt to cut a slice."

By the 1850s, "costermongers sold pineapple by the piece – 'a taste of paradise for just a penny a slice.'" Canning and mass availability came soon after. And today, we hardly give this noble, primitive delicious fruit a second's thought.

The Sad Short Life of Van Tuong Nguyen

On 12 December 2002 Van Tuong Nguyen, a 22 year-old Australian citizen of Vietnamese origin, was arrested at Singapore's Changi airport in transit from Cambodia to Australia after there was discovered upon his person 13.9 ounces of pure heroin. In March 2004 he was convicted under Singapore's strict "Misuse of Drugs Act," which carries a mandatory death sentence for anyone found guilty of trafficking in more than 15 grams of heroin. Nguyen was sentenced, as they say, to hang by the neck until dead.

Van and his identical twin brother, Khoa, were born on 17 August 1980 in a refugee camp in southern Thailand. Their mother, Kim, had just fled her native Vietnam in a makeshift boat. The boys' grandfather had worked for a French company and his brother for the Americans; both were imprisoned by the North Vietnamese after the Americans, in April 1975, shredded their documents and fled their embassy by air, as their South Vietnamese collaborators scaled the walls and leapt for the helicopters.

The birth was by caesarian, so Kim wasn't sure which son had been born first. Because Van was a little heavier at birth, she designated him the "older brother," a decision with weighty consequences, as it fell upon the "first-born" son to uphold the family name and assume the burden of responsibility.

Although Kim believed her infant sons were fated to spend their childhood amid the misery and squalor of the refugee camp, she was able to make her way to Australia with her boys on her back when they were six months old, eventually settling in Melbourne.

Annie Hawkins, a kindergarten teacher at St. Ignatius Kindergarten, where Van and Khoa were enrolled, remembered the four-year-olds as sad but inseparable boys, clinging to each other and speaking in Vietnamese. It was the first time they'd been separated from their mother. But despite their troubles, she said, they were "the most delightful little boys, full of energy and very loving - and very funny." Even at that age, moreover, Van took the role of protector and always ensured Khoa was happy and safe, a role that several teachers and friends down the year would confirm.

Kim remarried in 1989, but her new husband secretly beat the boys, something she discovered on her own, as the boys never told her. In high school, it became clearer that although the boys were identical, as someone put it, they were completely different. Van was a good student, well mannered and responsible, while Khoa had started to rebel, dabbling in drugs and alcohol and eventually graduating to heroin while running up $30,000 in debts. Khoa served time for drug-trafficking offences and was released from prison in July 2002.

It was to pay off Khoa's debts that Van agreed, in December of 2002, to carry the drugs from Cambodia to Australia via Singapore, his first trip outside of Australia since he'd arrived.

As Van sat in prison, the legal efforts to mitigate the sentence began to exhaust themselves. A fellow inmate, the man scheduled to hang before Van, described him as a "baby among hardened criminals."

The Singaporean government rejected all appeals by the Australian legal team that was working the Nguyen case, as well as by the diplomatic envoys of the Australian government. It was beginning to look like Van Truong Nguyen would die shortly on a noose. Kim and Khoa Nguyen flew to Singapore and made personal appeals.

In a particularly cruel twist, Singaporean laws forbid any physical contact between death row inmates and family members prior to execution for reason of the potentially "traumatising" effect such contact can have on the condemned. As the situation began to look hopeless, Kim Nguyen's efforts became focused on merely hugging her child, whom she had not touched in years, one last time before he died. The Singaporean prime minister, however, refused even this small request. Only when the Australian prime minister himself personally intervened did the Singaporean government agree to relax the restriction and allow Kim Nguyen to hold Van's hand. Nevertheless, a hug was out of the question.

On the day before the scheduled execution, Kim Nguyen reached her hand through a steel grille to touch the hand of her son for some moments. Later, she told a lawyer that she was allowed so much as to touch his face and hair, which she found to be "a great comfort." During their brief conversation, Van told her he was frightened to die, particularly at so young an age, but had come to accept his fate.

This morning at dawn, Van Truong Nguyen, clutching his rosary beads and reciting psalm 23 again and again, walked through the shadow of the valley of death to the gallows where he was hanged by the neck until he was dead.